Jackson Pollock (24 page)

In the year that had passed since Pollock had completed his mural hardly anyone had
seen it, for the simple reason that it was
hanging in his patron’s apartment. But Peggy Guggenheim was eager to show it off to
the public, convinced that it represented the high point of Pollock’s career. On March
19, 1945, she held a reception at her apartment to coincide with the opening of Pollock’s
second show. More than a hundred guests showed up, and their reactions to the mural
were predictably varied.

Among the viewers was Clement Greenberg, of
The Nation
. He admired the mural enormously. “People said it just went on and on like glorified
wallpaper,” he later said. “I thought it was great.” Seeing the mural marked a decisive
moment in Greenberg’s intellectual life. It was then that he realized that Pollock
was something more than just a talented painter; he was nothing less than the one
American artist who could give expression to the complex innovations of European painting
while still managing to look quintessentially American. “I wanted to see somebody
come along,” Greenberg explained, “who could match the French so we could stop being
minor painters over here.” In Pollock he found him, an artist who had not only assimilated
Picasso but had gone on to challenge him. Pollock, he believed, was the legitimate
heir to the modernist tradition in art.

The two men became close friends. With Pollock’s encouragement, Greenberg began stopping
by 46 East Eighth Street on a regular basis to look around his studio and see how
his work was progressing. A painter himself, Greenberg had grown up in the Bronx,
the son of Polish immigrants, and had started drawing at the age of four. “I copied
everything,” he once said. “I got pretty good at working from nature.” After studying
literature at Syracuse University, he started his writing career as a literary critic
but turned to art criticism in the forties, writing reviews for
The Nation
and longer, more theoretical pieces for
Partisan Review
. He had great confidence in his own opinions, which gave him an air of authority
in spite of his ordinary appearance and polite, sometimes clumsy manner. On his visits
to Pollock’s studio Greenberg was always terse in his appraisals. “Mmm,” he might
say, admiring a painting, “that’s good.” He provided Pollock with essential support
at a time when few people realized how good Pollock was.

Reviewing Pollock’s recent show, Greenberg was ardent in his praise. “Pollock’s second
one-man show at Art of This Century establishes him, in my opinion, as the strongest
painter of his generation and perhaps the greatest to appear since Miró. . . . There
has been a certain amount of self-deception in School of Paris art since the exit
of cubism. In Pollock there is absolutely none, and he is not afraid to look ugly—all
profoundly original art looks ugly at first.”

But no other critics seemed to like the show—not the few who reviewed it. Maude Riley,
writing in
Art Digest
, confessed straightforwardly: “I really don’t get what it’s all about.” Parker Tyler,
writing in the Surrealist magazine
View
, likened Pollock’s designs to “baked macaroni.” Robert Coates, of
The New Yorker
, an early admirer of Pollock’s work, didn’t bother reviewing his second show and
neither did the critic of
The New York Times
.

By the time Pollock’s second show closed, none of the paintings had sold. And in spite
of the flurry of publicity he was still fairly obscure. “At this time,” Greenberg
explained, “Ben Shahn was considered the best living American painter, and he sold.”
Pollock, by comparison, had yet to be invited to participate in such routine art events
as the Whitney Museum “Annuals,” yearly surveys of contemporary art that generally
featured well over a hundred artists. That Greenberg had singled out Pollock as “the
strongest painter of his generation” had little effect on his reputation, for Greenberg
had no more of an audience than Pollack did. Five years would pass before Pollock
and his tiny supporting cast traveled from the periphery of the art world to center
stage.

Figure 1.
Camp with Oil Rig
, undated. (Courtesy Mr. and Mrs. John W. Mecom, Jr.)

Figure 2.
Self-Portrait
, undated. (The Pollock-Krasner Foundation)

Figure 3.
Going West
, undated. (National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Thomas
Hart Benton)

Figure 4. Albert Pinkham Ryder,
Sentimental Journey
. (Courtesy Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery)

Figure 5. Thomas Hart Benton,
Moonlight Over South Beach
. (Courtesy Sotheby’s, Inc., New York)

Figure 6. Thomas Hart Benton,
The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley
, 1934. (Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas)

Figure 7. Mural study for Greenwich House, detail, undated. (Courtesy Charles Pollock)

Figure 8.
T.P’s Boat in Menemsha Pond
, undated. (The New Britain Museum of Art; gift of T. P. Benton)